Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

So, rather than stop delivery and fix known problems, the MDA opted to not fix the problems and accept delivery of missile intercepts that have a fair chance of not working. A supplier used the wrong type of solder to make up wiring harnesses in the interceptors. The solder that they used is susceptible to corrosion.

So the interceptors have thrusters that might not aim them properly and then bad wiring that might cause them to miss the incoming missiles. The MDA apparently tried to paper over the problem and hope that nobody would notice. Because what counted to the MDA was meeting their numbers in the number of interceptors deployed, not whether or not the damned things would even work.

Stalin would have had the managers shot.

There should be no surprise that Donald Rumsfeld's partially to blame for this clustefuck, as he exempted the MDA from rules on procurement and testing. At this point, it is worthwhile considering whether Rummy was really an enemy agent.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

On one of the timed-fire stages, I lost track and almost ended up with an unfired round. When I realized that the bolt hadn't locked back, I snapped a shot off, which cost me a couple of points. Still, timed-fire is my best phase of the match. I can shoot that into the low-mid 90s per each run.

The club matches are not really hard-core. Which is fine, this is for fun.

One of the other shooters had Bushnell Sentry spotting scope. I could see the holes in the black of his target at 50 yards with it, so I probably ought to think about getting one.

Today has been the day that we traditionally remembered those who died during wartime.*

2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, the 100th anniversary of the first full year of World War One, the 75th anniversary of the first full year of World War Two, the 50th anniversary of the initial escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War and the 25th anniversary of Operation Desert Shield.** It has indeed been a good year for the war buffs.
____________________________________________* Until Nixon and the Congress fucked it up by making Memorial Day into a shopping extravaganza.
** Desert Shield marked the official beginning of the Era of Constant Wartime, which we find ourselves in now.

The funny thing is that Frothy thinks that his campaign was a success in 2012. Which is bullshit, of course. There aren't second-place winners in elections*. What "success" Frothy had in 2012 was because Willard Romney was such a tool that even a few million GOP voters couldn't stomach him. Rmoney still won the nomination, which meant, of course, that Frothy lost.
_____________________________________* Or gunfights.

A "red flag" is having a sleeper compartment and not checking any luggage. Why the fuck you'd want to check your bag when you're renting a room on the train where you can keep your shit is apparently unfathomable to the DEA.

Just get in your car and drive. If Amtrak is happy to let the American Stasi board the train and hassle its paying customers, then long-distance rail travel deserves to die.

DARE, which is an acronym for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, is a Reagan-era "just say no to drugs" education program. Your local paper, especially in smaller towns, may run stories about kids completing DARE training and getting some certificate.

The problem is that the program doesn't work. It's a government boondoggle for the DARE presenters (mostly cops, it would seem) and for the companies that produce DARE educational materials. Just like "abstinence-only" sex education, DARE is both a darling of the Right (because it was dreamed up by Saint Ronnie) and is wholly ineffective.

DARE is a big government program promoted by people who hate big government.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Making Memorial Day into a three day weekend is akin to those pissant towns that declare that they're only running speed traps to enforce the law: You know they're lying about it. The only reason that they run speed traps is to collect revenue. If they weren't allowed to keep the money, they'd not run the speed traps (or disincorporate as a town).

The three-day-weekend Memorial Day is all about money. It's all about encouraging people to spend their money. It has fuck-all to do with honoring those deceased men and women who served their country.

That's close to a 2-1 majority vote.. not even close for the Church in a country that is about 85% Catholic.

It's becoming clear that fewer and fewer people are going to stand for being lectured on morality by the protectors of pedophiles. That sentiment is probably even stronger in Ireland after the horrors of the Magdalene "schools" became public knowledge.

You pack of greedy, amoral, capitalist swine, trying to profit off the sacrifices of those who died for our country. There is probably a special circle in Hell for you, where you will spend eternity drowning in lakes of molten gold or silver.

I was told that his final destination was an airport that was 110nm away. There were two hours of daylight left, he had a 15kt headwind, so he was going to spend the night at an airport in between. Even in no-wind conditions, his destination was a two-hour flight, as Jennies cruise at about 55kts.

Dealing with customer service is like calling directly into a locked ward at the State Nut Barn. Only a lot less productive.

The Magic Elf Box that provides VoIP and Internet to my office is deader than Dick Cheney's conscience. The power light is off. I took it to a neighboring office, which has the same service, and plugged it into their power supply. The Elf Box was still in Dead Parrot mode.

I called tech support. After getting around the automated troubleshooter, I told the person on the other end of the line what the problem was. That worthy being still had to run through a series of checks... line was OK, I'd paid my bill, etc., etc. I gave up and just let the person run through the checklist, for I realized that screaming "the power light is not on, the Elf Box is dead, dead, dead" would probably not be productive.

They're sending a tech, which got me the obligatory lecture on "if the problem is the line in your building, there will be a charge". Big whoop, because the Elf Box couldn't be much deader if John Wilkes Booth had shot it.

I don't think it much matters who you call, dealing with "customer service" always seems to be an exercise in frustration. This modern age has its suck factors, and customer service is one of them.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

In a little bit of link-surfing last night, I came across one writer who claimed that all of the bikers killed in Waco were shot by the cops. See, the bikers had a bit of a beef with each other, so they were allegedly utilizing alternative dispute resolution techniques and the cops took a dim view of them doing so.

Charles Lindbergh opened the throttle of The Spirit of St. Louis and took off from Roosevelt Field in New York. A little over 33 hours later, he landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris.

The Spirit is in the Smithsonian. Le Bourget Airport is still in operation. Roosevelt Field was plowed up sixty years ago by greedhead developers, who eventually built a shopping mall. There were still a number of airplanes from the First World War time period at Roosevelt Field when it was closed. They formed the nucleus of the collection now at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.

One of the lesser known facts is that the neurosurgeon who was on the medical team that treated Lawrence after the crash, Dr. Hugh Cairns, then began a study on head injuries suffered by motorcycle riders. His work led directly to the development of crash helmets.

Monday, May 18, 2015

If you have any hankering for good old hard-shell science fiction, then if you haven't started on Marko's series, why the frell not?

Keep yerselves amused. I'm busy enjoying this one. Hell, yeah!

UPDATE: Finished it. Marko can write. Keeping a tale coherent through a thousand pages of print is no small feat. And he's not done, for he's writing #4, "Chains of Command".

I think that in all of that, I only noticed one little detail which had me scratching my head and going "huh?". Which is pretty damn amazing, considering that I've read some decent SF that couldn't get through a chapter without wondering "WTF".

Unhinge your wallets and buy the books. I'll give you my word-- if you don't like the books, then you'll have no trouble finding someone who will.

This cake was kind of baked. If the prosecutor was one of the few kids from the Massachusetts School of Law to pass the bar in 2014 and if the defense had dug up and reanimated Johnnie Cochran, I doubt if the outcome would have changed very much.

There will be appeals, of course, but probably they'll be dealt with swiftly and he'll be executed before the decade is out.

The master of a lot of fuckery and evil for the last forty-plus years: Donald Rumsfeld. He had a delusion that if New York City went under, that the financial sector would move to Chicago, his home town.

It was not the first delusion that Rumsfeld had; it would by no means be his last.

Competing for a DoD weapons contract isn't for small-time operators. It's not just submitting guns and passing the field trials, boys. It's dealing with all of the paperwork and procedures for military procurement.

Friday, May 15, 2015

The state of Illinois, like a lot of governments (and companies), deliberately underfunded its pension system for many, many years. The politicians diverted the money that should have gone into the pension system for other purposes.[1]

So the way that the state chose to deal with owing about a hundred billion dollars to the pension system was to "reform" the pension system because of a fiscal emergency brought on by their own deliberate failure to do what they promised to do. The courts said "not so fast, bucko".

Gov. Bruce Ratfuck, who is a mighty champion of tax breaks for the well-off, now wants to change the state constitution. So he can continue the state policy of fucking over people who worked for it.
_______________________________________[1] Presumably, to do things such as give tax breaks to the rich.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

And not to mention a complete recall of the first batch of guns, which Remington screwed up worse than the Hubble Telescope.

I hope that they did it right this time, I really do. For they really screwed the pooch the first time around.*

The PR piece does seem familiar, though....

_________________________________________* And to all of those who have been lambasting Colt's unionized workers for "destroying a great American arms maker", allow me to suggest that the now-closed manufacturing plant in North Carolina was likely not unionized.

"JEB's listing Dubya as a 'top foreign policy adviser' is like listing Ted Bundy as a consultant on women's issues."

And yes, it's "JEB", not "Jeb". Those are his initials; his campaign wants people to call him "JEB" because "John Ellis Bush" sounds like the name of the loan officer at Bank of America who is cheerfully foreclosing on your home.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Of course it's not the same. EAL has been dead for nearly a quarter-century. Maybe this time around, Frank Lorenzo won't gut it the way that he gutted the original.

I have some fond memories of the Eastern Shuttle. But that was back before you had to buy tickets in advance and show up at the airport two hours before a flight. I remember the flight attendants coming down the aisle of that 727 with a credit-card embosser to collect fares, in flight. And if there were 200 people going to DCA and the airplane held 180, they'd drag out another airplane. For a long while, the back up was an Electra, though I never got to ride in one.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The vet wants me to collect a urine sample. His idea was to empty the litter box and then leave it empty, because some cats would use it anyway,

I vetoed that idea. Jake is likely to show his displeasure by peeing next to it. Or on my bed.

Second idea: Put him in the carrier for a few hours prior to the followup visit. That didn't sound like a good idea, for he'd just soak his fur in pee. What I needed was to have him above the floor of the carrier.

So I went to the hardware store and just wandered around. One of the kids there asked if he could help me find what I needed. I told him that I had no idea what I needed.

I found these:

They're sink liners. You use them to keep from scratching the porcelain. And so, with a little bit of scissors work:

I doubt if he'll pee in the carrier. But at least I'll have tried to collect a sample.

Hell, let's be honest, here: The DoJ won't prosecute CitiGroup for anything. The CEO of any of the big banks could have a 14-year-old virgin hung up by her heels and cut up for steaks to serve in the executive dining room and the DoJ would just say "tut-tut".

There are a lot of different markers for fascism, but labeling dissent as treason and using the power of the police to protect the interests of corporations are two of them. But hey, the Feebies have been flirting with this game since before they created the Nightwatch InfraGard program. (Some otherposts on it.) The FBI has a track record of confusing political dissent with treason that goes back longer than most of my readers have been alive.

If there is one thing that the Ferguson riots have exposed, it is how rotten the municipal court system is in Missouri, especially in St. Louis County.* Pissant little municipalities abound in the county, surviving on ticket revenue. The state legislature is cracking down on it, finally.

The defenders of the system have been screeching that all they are doing is enforcing the law. Which is no defense, for if that's all they cared out, then it shouldn't matter to them who gets to keep the money from the fines. Their cops are free to write tickets, but the pisspot little cities shouldn't be reaping a harvest as a result.
__________________________________________* I have little doubt that the system is equally rotten, if not more so, in most other states.

Monday, May 11, 2015

The NFL hasn't been saluting veterans at the games out of a sense of patriotism, nosirree! Those "salutes" are not based on gratitude to our men and women who defend our country, no, they're based on greed.

Jake had two spells of barfing today. The first was under the kitchen table, the second on my bed. I gave him the same antacid med that I used to give George. He's now sleeping in one of the places that he goes to when he wants to be out of sight. My vet said to give him Science Diet canned food for urinary health, but you'd think that I had offered him arsenic laced with Ebola.

Not much in the way of jet noise videos for this airplane. The airplanes first flew in 1957 and they flew for about a year before they were retired.

When I go searching for videos for this series, I often find what would be nice ones. Except that some anacephalic producer has laid on a music track. Why those clowns can't let the airplanes' engine noises speak for themselves is beyond my understanding.

What'll happen is that there will be talk of lawsuits. Then the Right Wing Noise Machine will get its outrage on. A GoFundMe Hater-Aid account will be started to help pay for the restaurant owner's legal fees. He'll get a whomping amount of money from that, just like the Pizza Joint of Hate did in Indiana.

The production budget hasn't been made public, which is probably not a good sign. Hollywood accounting practices are arcane enough to make even the Enron boys say "really?" Hollywood accountants buy red ink by the barrel and black ink by the ounce. A rule of thumb is that a film has to make at least 2.5 times its production budget to turn a profit, maybe closer to four times, but the dishonesty in accounting in Hollywood is so rampant that there never should have been another Eddie Murphy movie, since Coming to America, which made over nine times its production budget, was declared to be a loss.

(Moral: If they offer you a percentage of the profits, punch them in the throat.)

But I digress.

Science fiction fans may love the movie, but there is a one-word retort to that: Serenity.

Right now, some folks are bloviating at a podium. The flyover starts at 12:10 ET.

UPDATE: Underwhelming. They either didn't position microphones to catch the engine noise of the airplanes, or they weren't working. I hope that, if they made a video of the event, that they had more cameras than just the one they used for the webcast.

(And why nobody told that clown in the white hat to sit the fuck down....)

I remain unconvinced that the NSA would bother to follow the law. Even if Congress were to limit Section 215 phone collections and even if the courts were to rule that the NSA's mass-monitoring is unconstitutional, I see no way that would be enforceable.

It would take another Ed Snowden to leak the program. Jimmy the Perjurer and others were very comfortably denying what the NSA did until Snowden leaked it. The NSA will probably bet that another Snowden won't happen anytime soon. So they'll keep on doing what they want to do because they're effectively an extra-legal operation to begin with.

Because most stuff involving the NSA goes to the FISA Court and we all know the outcome there:

As far as I know, the Army hadn't bought any 1911s since the end of World War Two. They're just sitting in storage, costing about $200,000 a year to maintain.

Sure, the CMP would have to inspect them all, which would cost something. But they'd probably sell, on average, for at least $500 apiece. Do the math: $45 million, plus a savings of $200K a year, less the sales costs. Still enough to buy one or two new H-60s.

I pretty much guarantee that if you were to walk up to a person who was unable to defend himself/herself, punch that person in the face and then kick them, and if there was video of that, the local prosecutor would have no problem with going to trial on a charge of aggravated assault.

I don't know what celestial bodies have to be in line for me to agree with him on anything, but there it is.

There was a time when the slang for a defense of assault based on unbearable provocation was called "The Toyota Defense." (As in "he asked for it, he got it.")

It rarely worked.

Pamela Gellar is a hate-mongering troll. Like all such trolls, her game is not to contribute to the public discourse on her pet issue, but to throw gasoline around and hope that somebody else supplies the match, so she can then accuse them of burning down the place.

She got what she wanted.

To be clear: Shooting trolls is not acceptable. Debating them is fruitless. You don't have to listen to, let alone argue with trolls. The First Amendment gives trolls the right to speak, but it does not create an obligation in anyone to listen to them. But shooting at them only encourages trolls. It feeds them. Do not feed the trolls.

Violence towards trolls is not permissible. Violence towards anyone expressing a point of view that you don't like will not gain you adherents. It only creates enemies.

Monday, May 4, 2015

This is one of the more important river junctions in the nation: The meeting of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at Cairo, Illinois. The Ohio is further away. The land closest is in Missouri, the tip is southernmost Illinois and beyond that is Kentucky.

A little further down from Cairo, the Mississippi loops back up, brushes by New Madrid, MO and heads back south. All three waterways visible are parts of the Mississippi. The land between the closest and middle portions of the river makes up the Kentucky Bend, though the portion to the right in the photo is in Tennessee.

When The Powers That Be in Gideon, MO wanted to build a new airport, they just built it next to the old one.

Cape Girardeau, MO is to the left of the river. They filmed some of the last Ben Affleck movie there.

And since this is an airplane post, this one was gassing up at my home plate before I left.

Ol' Andrew Cuomo, the governor, would rather make noices about limiting the magazine capacity of handguns than try to do something really hard, like clean up corruption in state government. Maybe because the corruption probes are hittingtoo close to home?

I can try to paraphrase what I overheard soon after the news came out that six Baltimore cops were being charged for killing Mr. Gray: "They had to indict those cops in Baltimore because otherwise, the thugs would have burned the city to the ground."

Here's a clue that a city has a problem: When the residents trust street gangs over the cops. A lot of this traces right back to a Giuliani-wannabee, Martin O'Malley, who parlayed running a city which operated on a "if yer brown, yer down" oppressive policing regime, into the governorship of the state.[1]

The only reason the City of Baltimore hasn't paid multi-million dollar civil judgments is that state law caps their liability at $200K per maiming, beat-down and killing. It's a law that places with bad cops, like Prince George's County, have been using for years as a way to avoid having to deal with their badged-up goon squads.

I submit that anybody who thinks that there would have been anything other than another coverup of police brutality without the riots is smoking meth. While riots over police brutality are nothing new in this country[3], it would seem that now, the power structure is starting to pay a little bit of attention.[4]

We'll see if they can obtain convictions. Given that prosecutors around the country have had a long track record of making sure that people of color are excluded from juries on the flimsiest of reasons, I'm not holding my breath.
____________________________________[1] The little fuck wanted to run for President, but between his moves at gun-control (which has been driving Beretta out of the state) and his talent for naked racial oppression, good luck with that, Marty.
[2] It'd be silly to even suggest that the "strict constitutionalists" of the Tea Party and whatnot would ever lift a finger in support of the people who have been illegally detained by the cops. Maybe the protestors should have tried to graze cows in the city parks.
[3] Though the Right refuses to recognize that.
[4] But don't worry: There is almost a national system for ensuring that abusive and murderous cops get to keep their badges and guns.
[5] The cops in Ferguson were happy with the one they had.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.